Fascism On the Homepage

It arrived draped in the Red, White and Blue Cross flag. And the New York Times, which only last week noticed that democracy had collapsed, has today taken a giant logical leap forward and observed that fascism has come to America and taken its place.

The Gray Lady only got one thing wrong in the headline "Health Law Turns Obama and Insurers Into Allies," and that is in the application of the present tense. Obama and the insurers were allies from the get-go, as they connived behind closed doors to remove the public option from the equation and the president continued to lie with impunity about this fact to the American public. Obama's faux populist modus operandi, as we all should have realized by now, is to decry "fat cats"with his smirking mouth and then grandly reward them with his corrupt actions.

Writes health beat reporter Robert Pear,

With the health insurance marketplace now open for a second year, President Obama will be depending more than ever on the insurance companies that five years ago he accused of padding profits and canceling coverage for the sick.

Those same insurers have long viewed government as an unreliable business partner that imposed taxes, fees and countless regulations and had the power to cut payment rates and cap profit margins.

But since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, the relationship between the Obama administration and insurers has evolved into a powerful, mutually beneficial partnership that has been a boon to the nation’s largest private health plans and led to a profitable surge in their Medicaid enrollment.

(Stop the presses and start lobbying the Pulitzer judges!)

 The insurers in turn have provided crucial support to Mr. Obama in court battles over the health care law, including a case now before the Supreme Court challenging the federal subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of low- and moderate-income consumers. Last fall, a unit of one of the nation’s largest insurers, UnitedHealth Group, helped the administration repair the HealthCare.gov website after it crashed in the opening days of enrollment.

(The hand that stirs the ladle in the tainted kludge soup.)

So much money is at stake that insurers may soon be on a collision course with the Republican majority in the new Congress. Insurers, often aligned with Republicans in the past, have built their business plans around the 2010 law and will strenuously resist Republican efforts to dismantle it. Since Mr. Obama signed the law in March 2010, share prices for four of the major insurance companies — Aetna, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth — have more than doubled, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has increased about 70 percent.

(You almost feel sorry for the GOP hypocrites, agonizing between the rock of destroying ObamaCare and the hard place of relinquishing all that cash.)

In addition, the Affordable Care Act has engendered growth in the role of private insurers in Medicaid. The law expanded eligibility for Medicaid, and most of the new beneficiaries receive care from private health plans under contracts awarded by state Medicaid agencies. As a result, Medicaid enrollment is up more than eight million, or 15 percent, in the last year.

In a survey of 10 insurance companies, Joshua R. Raskin, an analyst at Barclays, reported that their revenues from the Medicare Advantage program were up about 10 percent this year. UnitedHealth Group’s Medicaid enrollment surged by nearly one million people, or 24 percent, in the last year, said Stephen J. Hemsley, the chief executive. At another large insurer, WellPoint, the expansion of Medicaid “is proving highly profitable,” Christine Arnold, a managing director of Cowen and Company, wrote in a recent report.

You may remember that WellPoint was actually the architect of the 2,000-page law. Its lobbyist, one Liz Fowler, spun through the revolving doors from the insurance cartel to dictate the terms and conditions to her apprentice, Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus. And once the bill was finally rammed through, Fowler strolled on over to the White House to help Obama craft its actual (and it turned out, abysmal) implementation. And then it was through the revolving doors again for the talented Ms.Fowler, for a stint with Johnson & Johnson. (Price-fixed drugs and medical supplies.) Jonathan Gruber of #StupidGate and comic book fame has nothing on this versatile princess of fascism. As Glenn Greenwald wrote of her, "It's difficult to find someone who embodies the sleazy, anti-democratic, corporatist revolving door that greases Washington as shamelessly and purely as Liz Fowler." 

Unless, of course, it's Barack Obama. It's still early days in his fascistic career, he's still young, and his solid gold revolving doors await him.

As I responded to Paul "Conscience of a Neoliberal" Krugman's latest shameless shilling for Democratic Party crumbs equaling "good government"  and dismissal of #StupidGate as a fake scandal -- including what he misleadingly calls "health reform,"

It's not "health reform" -- it's a piecemeal reining-in of the predatory insurance cartel. And although the premiums may be holding steady, the Affordable Care Act is anything but for many people. Deductibles and co-pays are through the roof.

Health care in America is just like the lottery. It's the luck of living in the right state and picking the right plan at the right time. You're not a patient who gets treated. You're a consumer who goes shopping. Some people will be "covered" and others will still go bankrupt when they get sick and can't afford a $5,000 annual deductible on a $20,000 income.

That "fake scandal" that Paul Krugman refers is, of course, being used for nefarious political purposes by the GOP. But the fact remains that MIT economist and ACA consultant (to the tune of $400,000)  Jonathan Gruber not only called people stupid -- he admitted that the law was made deliberately opaque. Politicians were more interested in making this delayed "reform" seem deficit-neutral than in ensuring that everybody got covered. Politics trumped the public good. And that IS a scandal, no matter which side of the neoliberal duopoly you're on.

The fact remains that least 40 million Americans remain uninsured, and will continue to needlessly sicken and die in the richest country on earth. We have the most expensive medical care in the world and still rank a shameful 51st in life expectancy.

That is the scandal.

Government will succeed when we get Single Payer.

Amnesty Sweepstakes

As many as five million lucky undocumented immigrants may be granted amnesty from deportation as early as this week by executive order of President Obama. So let the Latino community rejoice, right? The odds of winning are just slightly lower than fifty-fifty!

Well, not so fast. All those deportees-in-waiting could have their newly-issued working papers, drivers' licenses and other paraphernalia of "legality" yanked out from under them at the drop of a hat. Or, as Obama himself sensitively put it on Saturday,

There is a very simple solution to this perception that somehow I’m exercising too much executive authority: Pass a bill I can sign on this issue. Give me a bill that addresses those issues, I’ll be the first one to sign it. And metaphorically I’ll crumple up whatever executive actions we will take and toss them in the waste basket because we will now have a law that addresses these issues.

It's good to know that the president will only "metaphorically" crumple up the hopes and dreams and civil rights of the newly reprieved and throw them away the minute the Republicans signal they want to make a deal on immigration reform. His statement is bound to cheer up the 11 million people in this country "illegally" as well as the American-born children whose parents had the poor taste to be born across some border that exists only for human beings without much money in their pockets.... but not for the southbound border-crossing guns, and NAFTA-enabled, outsourced jobs and mobile factories which cross it each and every day. And not for the drugs and profits and cheap labor that flow north into the pockets of American oligarchs each and every day.

Obama's temporary granting of amnesty actually falls to the ideological right of the relief granted by Ronald Reagan to several million alien residents in 1986. As Julia Preston writes in the New York Times,

 Unlike that law, which gave permanent-resident green cards to 2.7 million immigrants, Mr. Obama’s executive actions will not provide any formal, lasting immigration status, much less a pathway to citizenship.

 The actions will, however, have a large and, White House officials hope, swift impact on the daily lives of many immigrant families, removing fears that relatives could be separated from one another by deportations. Many immigrants will also receive work permits, which will give them Social Security numbers and allow them to work legally under their own names and travel within the United States, although not abroad. In some states, they will be able to get driver’s licenses and professional certificates.

All of which the president will gladly crumple up and toss in the circular file the minute the Republicans pass a bill which would not necessarily be so generous. As a matter of fact, the previous Senate bill that died in the House was light on the humanitarianism and heavy on the militarized border and rewards to Silicon Valley in the form of cheap imported tech labor. The "pathway to citizenship" contained in that bill included a draconian ten-year waiting period for actual civil rights while still requiring foreign workers to pay income taxes. No taxation without representation would not apply.

So while my first impulse was to applaud the president for his gesture of humanity, I am now having my usual cynical second thoughts. Obama, the deporter-in-chief of more people than under any previous administration, could simply be using these millions of people as political pawns and eventual human waste product. Combined with his other recent liberal gestures --  calling for net neutrality, and the joint promise with China to curb pollution -- this immigration action could simply represent just another check on his legacy to-do list.  The object is for Barack Obama to be perceived by the Latino voters as trying to do the right thing, and for Republicans to be perceived as the only bad guys in the neoliberal duopoly.

If, however, Obama orders universal and unconditional amnesty, with no strings attached, I will be the first to stand up and applaud his political courage under fire.

But here's what I'm afraid of: His executive action will simply serve as the magnet to bring five million undocumented people out into the open and more exposed than ever. The better to catch them and jail them and deport them, my dears. 

Meanwhile, the Latino advocacy group Presente.Org is not happy with the president's piecemeal approach, because it gratuitously leaves out half the undocumented immigrants -- based solely on the fact that they don't belong to a "traditional" (read, Republican) family unit:

As President Obama considers options for an upcoming executive order on immigration policy, Presente.org, the nation’s largest online Latino organizing group, strongly rejects rumored administration proposals for an executive order covering less than half of the more than 11 million undocumented Americans in the US-- and is instead pushing for relief for all undocumented immigrants.

“We want relief from an all out assault on Latino family unity-- we need more than lip service to combat the rampant racial profiling and deportations currently plaguing our communities. Anything short of relief for all 11 million undocumented immigrants in America will ensure ongoing mass-deportations and separation of Latino families,” said Arturo Carmona, Executive Director of Presente.org, the nation's largest online Latino organizing group. “With the amount of hate against Latinos on display shown by Republican leaders in the House, we need President Obama to seize the opportunity and fight back against his ‘deporter in chief’ status.”

Immigration amnesty under Obama sounds a lot like the for-profit health insurance marketplace sweepstakes. A few million people will be granted relief, while millions more continue to live in fear, suffer, and even die. You'll never find out if you win it because you'll never be told what's actually in it. Everything good is either temporary or stop-gap, to be renewed annually in order to keep the fear and confusion at the absolute maximum.

Somewhere along the way, human rights turned into a lottery, and the social contract got crumpled up and tossed in the circular file.

 

Democracy Collapsed, and The Gray Lady Noticed

It was the worst voter turnout in three quarters of a century! Only slightly more than a third of eligible voters showed up for the meh-terms! And the Democrats lost big, almost as big as Democracy itself!

 Why, even in good old reliable New York -- where the Democratic choices (and rare victors) included a Wall Street puppet-governor with a hankering to break up "monopolistic" public education, and a crusading Democratic  attorney general who forgot all about prosecuting banksters once Obama gave him a seat in the First Lady's box at a State of the Union address -- the turnout was a "shameful" 28.8%. 

Shame, shame, shame on the voters, was the subliminal message in a New York Times editorial published on Tuesday. Shame on the stay-at-home slackers who let a combination of acrimony and apathy get in the way of handing a mandate to the most loathsome and undeserving bunch of  hacks to come along in.... well, three-quarters of a century.

The Times editorial was about as clueless as the candidates themselves, as if that were even possible.

To be fair, the writers also partially blamed negative advertising and lack of a clear message (there they go with that "narrative deficit" meme again!) on the Democrats' resounding defeat, and the anti-Obama craze and outright mendacity  for the Republicans' relative success. But the Times missed the forest for the trees: it's the plutocracy and the corruption and the influence-peddling, stupid! The Supreme Court's decision equating money with speech went totally unmentioned in the data-driven angst and Gray Lady pearl-clutching.

My published response: 

 It wasn't just the disgust, the apathy, the voter suppression, the nasty TV ads. It was the mass epiphany that voting, all by itself, just doesn't mean what it used to, as in the good old days before Citizens United.

As Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens showed in their study of voting patterns, it wouldn't matter if there was an 80% turnout. Politicians pass laws based on what the wealthy want, period. What the authors call "economic elite domination" trumps democratic pluralism. Pro-change majorities get what they want only about 30% of the time, the study shows, and usually only if their desires mesh with those of the wealthy.

 For example, since the rich generally favor marriage equality as much as the average voter, we're seeing huge legislative successes in gay rights initiatives. On the other hand, since economic elites aren't too keen on a federal minimum wage or expanded Social Security, those ideas are going nowhere fast -- as are most policies that would benefit ordinary people.

So, blaming voters, telling us that "we get the government we deserve" based on apathy, or "voting against our interests" is getting mighty stale, mighty fast.

We are smarter than we're given credit for, while the intelligence of the elites who actually run this de facto oligarchy is tragically over-estimated.

 Memo to the victors with their spoils -- if you think that this rigged system has given you a popular mandate, you need to think again.

And in a follow-up response to a reader who disagreed with me:

 I didn't mean to suggest that we not vote at all. I can very well understand why so many people abstained, however. I voted in the meh-terms myself (albeit with some cynicism) because it was a local election, and states and counties are the only places where there is even a prayer for change., esp. with the progressive props on many ballots this year. I have also written comments and blog posts urging others to vote, with the full awareness that there are more weighted and "valuable" votes than ours being cast. So, we can't simply traipse to the polls every two and four years and then just sit back and rest and feel that we've done our entire "permitted" civic duty. There are plenty of other valuable ways to be a good citizen. I engage my more conservative friends in political discussions all the time.... sometimes my lefty reasoning strikes a chord, most times not, but at least I've engaged. I find there is a lot of common ground with "the other side" re Wall Street corruption and government surveillance, for example. So... voting, boycotting, writing, protesting, picketing, striking, organizing, not giving in to the divide and conquer techniques the duopoly uses to maintain its power. Activism of all kinds is necessary if we have a hope of reanimating our democracy.

Meanwhile, the corporate partisan wars are still trumping the class war as the acceptable media narrative. The latest battle is dubbed #GruberGate.  Just who is Jonathan Gruber, that rare purveyor of honesty, calling "stupid" anyway?  The Democrats are frantically trying to push this verbal loose cannon under the bus, all the while insisting that he is only calling the "yahoos" stupid.... not them. The Republicans are reveling in the joy of proving that just because they're professional paranoiacs doesn't mean liberal elites really aren't out to get 'em -- and now they can finally prove it, by golly. (You can read all about the latest smoking gun video here.)

 Very few pundits are actually talking about the duopolistic complicity of the whole corrupt system. They don't dare admit that our elected officials hold all of us in utter, sneering contempt, and that the low turnout last week is tantamount to a corporate coup. They don't dare admit that through this default "victory" our rulers hold power illegitimately. Not many of them are talking about the inconvenient truth that even with its abysmal 13% approval rating, Congress has seen the return of 95% of its members.

Admitting all of this might hasten the inevitable collapse of the fraudulent facade on top of the very real ruins of our democracy. And thus we pretend, we deflect, we scapegoat, we ignore the forest for the trees.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose we can believe in, toujours and ad infinitum.

It's the Stupidity, Stupid

It's that time of the season again for Democrats to defend the kludgey Affordable Care Act against the predations of the corrupt Supreme Court and the nefarious Republicans, who'd rather see one rich plutocrat thrive than have millions of regular folks enter for a chance to barely survive in the for-profit health insurance sweepstakes.

The latest round in Good Cop-Bad Cop kabuki involves the Supremes gratuitously deciding to take up a case involving the confusing state exchanges. One lower federal court recently decided that resident-consumers of states embracing the federal exchange should get the tax subsidies, while another lower court has decided the opposite. The highest court in The Homeland will now decide what the crafters of the law actually "intended."

So, just when I thought I'd seen the last of them, emails are again arriving, urging me to "click here" and "have the president's back" on his signature legislative achievement(s). These petitions obviously come attached to an appeal for money in order for the Democrats to "fight back" against the GOP Death Panel for the rights of a couple million people to both like their Obamacare and keep their Obamacare. This whole Supreme Court brouhaha is all over a stupid "typo,"* they shrill.

Of course, the ginned up hysteria is just more much ado about nothing. The Supreme Court "spared" the law once before, punishing only the poor re state Medicaid expansion, so they will likely do so again. After all, the law gifts the predatory insurance and pharmaceutical industries with profits beyond their wildest imaginings. No way will this money spigot be turned off to satisfy a cadre of phony libertarian Obama-haters.  

It's the latest manufactured crisis, designed to keep us on one side or the other instead of noticing that the two teams are both part of the same corrupt league, and that the game is fixed. It's also a very lucrative manufactured crisis, acting as a magnet for partisan fundraising and armies of K Street lobbyists bearing gifts of cash they don't even bother to hide any more. Bribery is legal now.

Luckily, a few intrepid truth-seekers have dug up a year-old video in which one of the original architects of the law is caught admitting that it was deliberately designed to be a complete confusing mess. Its opacity was built right in. Otherwise, it never could have passed.

Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist, was paid $400,000 to help the Obama administration rely on "the stupidity of the American voter" by writing the bill in such a "tortured way" as to deliberately disguise the fact that there was a tax involved in the individual mandate. (Psst... the dummies in the Heartland can't be told that the healthy will pay for the sick, because socialism.) The White House, according to this expert, was more interested in Congressional Budget Office scoring being politically beneficial to them, rather than the law itself being beneficial to the health of the lucky few recipients of insurance.

As constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley writes,

What is fascinating is that Gruber is open about what has long been hidden in this Administration: the lack of transparency as a tactical political vehicle. The ACA was pushed through by a muscle vote on a handful of votes while the Administration made claims that he later had to admit were misleading at best, such as the President’s repeated assurance that citizens could keep your current insurance policy if you liked it. Gruber also admits that the Administration crafted the law to avoid it being supported by a tax despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ later decision that it was a tax. Gruber says that, while he would have preferred to be honest and open, such considerations had to be set aside in the interests of passing the law — even by less than honest means.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is now (whoever could have predicted?) predicting fewer new enrollees than previously estimated. Their best case scenario is that by the end of 2015, a grand total of 9-10 million people will have been signed up. From the Washington Post:

HHS officials also said Monday that of the 8 million people who bought health plans by this past spring for the first year of coverage under the law, 7.1 million remained in them as of mid-October. Of those who left, some had stopped paying their monthly insurance premiums, and 112,000 were immigrants dropped by the government because they had not proved that they were eligible.The administration’s enrollment expectations appeared five days before the start of the second sign-up period through the federal insurance exchange being used in about three dozen states and through separate state-run exchanges. The figures also emerged as the health-care law — enacted in 2010 as a crowning domestic achievement of Obama’s presidency — is facing new political and legal peril.

As much as I despise the Republicans and the five reactionary justices of the Supreme Court, the Obama administration has to be considered equally culpable in this manufactured mess. As much as I would hate for the millions of people now benefiting under expanded Medicaid to be kicked off, or even for those partially subsidized enrollees to be deprived of their Bronze Plans (stories abound of $10,000 deductibles charged to workers who barely make ends meet as it is)  it's hard to defend the indefensible.

 Will these continued failures and challenges to the torture that is Obamacare nudge us closer to Single Payer health coverage? After all, despite the GOP's hollow "victory," most voters do favor progressive initiatives, including health care. Any improvements will likely come at the local level, because Big Money has full control in Washington.

Here is one ray of hope: student members of the notoriously arch-conservative  American Medical Association have just passed a resolution in support of state legislation supporting true universal health care:

Although the resolution applies only to the student section of the AMA, supporters say it sends a signal to the larger organization that many physicians-in-training think the most recent round of national health reform didn’t go far enough.

“Last Friday’s vote is yet further evidence that physicians – and in this case physicians-in-training – are increasingly angry about private insurance companies that meddle in doctor-patient relationship, deny access to care, balk at payment, and afflict providers and patients alike with costly and unnecessary red tape,” said Bradley Zehr, a second-year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine who helped write the resolution.“Med students want to practice medicine and to help people get better, not to be part of a corporate enterprise that puts financial gain over our patients’ well-being,” Zehr said. “They see the millions of people who will remain uninsured or underinsured under the Affordable Care Act. That’s why physician opinion is shifting toward a nonprofit, publicly financed, Medicare-for-All-type system that would cover everyone while also controlling costs.”

The Obama administration may have relied on the alleged stupidity of the American voter when it rammed through its corporation-friendly kludge. What they very stupidly haven't relied upon is the basic humanity and unacknowledged intelligence of the American voter, and the political power of the health care community  Americans are discovering that "voting" for representatives instead of policies is neither sufficient nor particularly effective in the runaway oligarchy that masquerades as a democracy.

__________________________________________________________________

* Contributor Pearl Volkov's comment on the Paul Krugman column (linked above) really zings it:


The complications of Obamacare go beyond a so called typo which could have
been deliberate in case someone is cleaning up as a result. The huge
thousands of pages of the original health care bill was never completely
read by voting Congresspeople by their own admission and left lots of
loopholes for misunderstanding, misstatements, misrepresentation,
misinformation and misconduct. Reports of the financial activities of the
numerous insurance companies handling medical claims are not only impossible to make sense out of but I firmly believe deliberately made complicated andconfusing to cover up the allocations of great sums of money to them from patients who have no choices and have no information how their coverage is allocated.

By covering some comparatively minor loopholes for people, you are so happyand busy rejoicing for these coverages that the miserly help which gives spotty coverage or none to many citizens is never mentioned.
If you are going to write columns of anger about the attempt to destroy
Obamacare whether for the right or wrong reasons, at least do your homework.

There are several progressive/liberal websites which keep accurate reports
on this issue and prove how the financial set up of Obamacare provides belowstandard quality of actual medical care for subscribers in comparison to the fees collected.

Neutering Dissent

Well Glory Hallelujah come on get happy. President Obama makes his preferences known, in no uncertain terms, and Internet freedom fighters throughout the land are exploding in gratitude, wonder and awe. From the official White House pronouncement published to great fanfare today:

“Net neutrality” has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation — but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted. We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas. That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.

When I was a candidate for this office, I made clear my commitment to a free and open Internet, and my commitment remains as strong as ever. Four years ago, the FCC tried to implement rules that would protect net neutrality with little to no impact on the telecommunications companies that make important investments in our economy. After the rules were challenged, the court reviewing the rules agreed with the FCC that net neutrality was essential for preserving an environment that encourages new investment in the network, new online services and content, and everything else that makes up the Internet as we now know it. Unfortunately, the court ultimately struck down the rules — not because it disagreed with the need to protect net neutrality, but because it believed the FCC had taken the wrong legal approach.

So net neutrality is a done deal, right? Not so fast, proles. If the FCC would like to go full Bartleby the Scrivener and "prefer not to" follow the boss's recommendations, then there is very little the lame duck boss can do about it.... capiche? Always remember to search for the hidden caveats and self-neutering "on the other hands" in  every Obama pronouncement. It's how the man rolls.

 And how can we forget that the president telegraphed his commitment to a free and open Internet by appointing an industry lobbyist to run the FCC?

It's interesting that Obama made his comments on the same day that Internet activists started picketing the residence of his college buddy and industry wheeler dealer/ FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. It's interesting that whatever Wheeler ends up doing, or pretends to be doing, the Republican Congress and/or Supreme Court can end up un-doing anyway. And by then, Obama will be freely making lucrative commitments of his own. Book advances, speaking gigs, board seats, foundations... here he comes.

Call me cynical, but is it also just a coincidence that Obama is making his "preferences" known on the first day of his trip to China, which is notorious for its own strict government control of the Internet? It seems possible that the president is simply trying to gain the upper hand and present himself as a beacon of light and freedom compared to that other authoritarian regime. It certainly seems to be just more gobbet of self-serving political propaganda.

Obama also is aiming to give himself some domestic cover for the contents of the secretive 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership, which he hopes to cement during this Asia junket. According to the latest leaked draft, Obama is actually pushing for more corporate control over the Internet, not less. Under the terms of the TPP, copyright and fair use laws would be subverted into the ability of powerful entities to gratuitously remove content that they don't like without the benefit of judicial process.  Obama's glib "preferences" could be immediately rendered moot and as empty as his suit under the terms and conditions of the corporate coup disguised as a "free trade" deal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation supplies all the anti-Net Democracy details contained in the leaked draft here. The "net" effect would be a chilling one for creativity and free expression. You could theoretically be subject to criminal penalties for pasting a Mickey Mouse illustration on your blog, or using a corporate logo or slogan for satiric purposes. Something like these:

 

President Obama did not put out a statement on these "trade" proposals of his, because the corporations which he serves would prefer him not to, lest the public get all in a tizzy. Ergo, today's White House Net Neutrality manifesto, designed to make us rest easy and stop paying attention while the president takes care of Business.

Cartoonified War Propaganda

The heck with those quietly murderous Navy Seals getting all the glory, when it's the demented Marine Penguins who have the real guts in the gruesome national spectacle that we call Perpetual War.

In the simpering guise of a Veterans Day public service announcement, first lady Michelle Obama has bared her toned arms to arm an adorably psychopathic quartet of Hollywood penguins with her official White House (top secret, just like CIA torture) marching orders: Get out there and stealthily gin up the patriotism and pity for the returning troops! According to the slickly produced recruitment video, our sacrificial warriors just can't get any respect from the self-involved consumer-citizens of the American Dream. Therefore, it's up to some lucrative DreamWorks characters -- one of whom likes to swallow dynamite and then blow stuff up through the magic of regurgitation -- to do the job for the Military-Industrial Complex.... and for Michelle Obama to star in the trailer for the next DreamWorks blockbuster, coming to a multiplex near you just in time for the annual gruesome shopping spree known as Black Friday.

Irresponsible Manufacturer Not Responsible for Penguin Ingesting Sharp Objects Before Vomiting

 USA (USA!USA!) Today goes along to get along and calls Mrs. Obama's commercial -- complete with its deafening ballistic soundtrack and cartoonified F-35 stealth bombers --  "cute."  Or maybe they're being ironic:

We are impressed, again: Along with all her other talents, Michelle Obama can add acting with an animated Madagascar penguin to her resume.As part of her ongoing support-the-veterans campaign, the first lady appears in a new animated short starring the tuxedoed birds from the upcoming DreamWorks movie, The Penguins of Madagascar.

 Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private, the wacky-but-adorable penguins who growl like battle-hardened Marines and are always minutes away from disaster, nearly waddled away with the previous animated Madagascar comedies in which they first appeared. Now the fowl have their own flick, opening Nov. 26. The animation geniuses at DreamWorks have joined the Operation Got Your 6 campaign, lending the feathered stars for a PSA to be shown in schools as part of the Take a Veteran to School program to connect kids and vets. Mrs. O plays…well, herself, dressed in a purple sleeveless shift in a room at the White House. Suddenly Skipper “appears” by her side. She hits her mark perfectly, turning her head to “talk” to him.“We’re a little tired of the Seals getting all the good missions,” barks Skipper. “What about the Penguins?”

So she gives them a top-secret mission to debunk myths about returning veterans. And they’re off on an adventure, after a little mishap in the White House with some broken crockery.

“We’ll fix that!” Skipper shouts as he’s leaving. Very cute.

Not for nothing does the Obama administration gratuitously call the 0-10 age group at which this PSA is aimed the "Homeland Generation." The newest generation is being groomed to feel the terror, wave the flag, shoot the guns, drop the bombs, hurl the TNT, and never dare ask what their country and their elected reps can do for them. Generation Homeland exists to tighten their belts and shed their blood in loyal service to the Plutocracy. Like the Penguins of Madagascar, they will only be let out of their dystopian zoo cages when it's time to spy and fight. After all, Leon Panetta is calling the ISIS campaign a 30-year war, so there's more than enough time for the Homeland warriors of the future to shape up, sign up and ship out.
 

The plutocrats sponsoring Michelle Obama's grotesque war-profiteering infomercial include the usual suspects. There are virtually all the corporate media conglomerates.... ABC-Disney, HBO, NBC Universal, Fox/News Corp.

 There's  mega-bank Wells Fargo, still striving to repair the image damaged by its brutal subprime loan and fraudclosure rampage against service members and civilians alike. There's Macy's, which got into a heap of trouble for racially profiling shoppers in its emporium. Then there's Comcast, whose CEO is Barack's political donor and golfing buddy and who really, really wants to bypass those pesky monopoly laws and buy Time Warner Cable, the better to rip off families, both military and non-military.

 The latest war propaganda effort, dubbed Got Your Six, is one more iteration of Michelle Obama's "Joining Forces"  PR campaign co-opting military families. It's the brainchild of the Democratic Party-aligned defense think tank, Center for a New American Security, (CNAS) which in its own turn is stuffed with a panoply of revolving-door surveillance state/Pentagon moguls -- including Richard Armitage and John Allen. There's even a guy named Nathaniel Fick who runs a venture capital outfit called Endgame. I kid you not. Lockheed Martin and Goldman Sachs also have their slimy grasping tentacles wrapped tightly around the irresistible investment opportunities that CNAS facilitates.

 So, would it be politically incorrect and/or cruel of me to characterize Michelle Obama as our First Fascist FLOTUS? I mean, did you ever see Eleanor Roosevelt shilling for Disney while she visited the World War II troops in the hospital, or using her bully pulpit to sell clothing emblazoned with corporate logos and military insignia? That is just what Mrs. Obama's Got Your 6 website does. It openly brags that Hollywood and corporations are joining with the war industry to profit off veterans even as it purports to help them with college aid and low-wage jobs in the service and retail sectors.

 It spreads the myth that the American military exists only to spread freedom throughout the world. Using such A-list actors/Obama donors as Harrison Ford and Sally Field, it brazenly characterizes American imperialists as educators and builders instead of the murderers and plunderers they truly are. I'm actually kind of surprised that DreamWorks didn't call the adorable cartoon characters they're using to sell war to kids Emperor Penguins. I guess they're using Madagascar Penguins to make war feel all warm and fuzzy and tropical ocean-breezy instead of as Antarctically cold as death.

 Plus, since Forever War sucks up an obscene amount of fossil fuels, the military-entertainment complex doesn't want to remind the tykes that the whole Antarctic ice shelf is melting and breaking off, and rising the ocean levels -- all thanks to greedy grownups acting in such a criminally negligent way toward the cannon fodder of the future.

Plutus Loves Potus

  What rout, whomping, tsunami, thumping, shellacking, rejection? All you had to do was look at President Obama's body language at his Wednesday press con to realize that a few Democrats losing their seats in the meh-terms will not upset the neoliberal order of which he remains the powerful front-man. He's even looking forward to slurping Bourbon with his new BFF Mitch McConnell. He is still hopey and not at all, he said, "mopey."

Why should he be? Hell is emptying out, and Plutus continues to rise, the hoards of wealth safe, hidden and secure thanks to Potus* and all his devilish minions.

 

Barack and Mitch to Plutus: Arise, Repatriate Thyself! (h/t William Blake)

  And if Obama's calm, self-satisfied demeanor didn't convince you that the plutocracy is triumphant, then maybe his actual words will:

The point is, it’s time for us to take care of business. There are things this country has to do that can’t wait another two years or another four years. There are plans this country has to put in place for our future. And the truth is, I’m optimistic about our future. I have good reason to be.I need Americans all across the country who are determined and big-hearted and ask what they can do and never give up and overcome obstacles, and they inspire me every single day.

I think that the president's confident persona was more a message to his global compatriots than to a disgusted, fearful American constituency. That's because Obama's next order of business-caretaking and obstacle-overcoming will be his trip to Asia,where he hopes to finally seal the deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He was quite shameless in his goal to work with Republicans to ram through this corporate coup behind our backs. Majority Leader-in-Waiting McConnell is equally as eager to get the job done for his cronies.

The president really does need Americans to be about as engaged  (around 30%) as they were on Election Day, when they foolishly thought they were sending a punishing message to the huckster-in-chief and his minions. Obama did admit that he is also listening to the two-thirds of eligible voters who didn't show up. Their silence must indeed be very inspiring to him:

 So, the most important thing I can do is just get stuff done and help Congress get some things done.

Ironically (and stupidly) enough, though, the next round of TPP negotiations is being held at the US Embassy in Beijing so as to avoid possible eavesdropping by the Chinese government, which is not part of the 12-nation partnership. Obama will ostensibly be in China as part of the separate Asia-Pacific Cooperation Forum (APEC). So, despite the optimism for bipartisan cooperation for trade deals displayed by Obama at his presser, there is a silver lining for the proles:

There are concerns that the TPP countries holding their own meetings in Beijing could irritate China, which is not part of the initiative, as such meetings might take the limelight away from the APEC ministerial and summit meetings China is hosting this year.

U.S. President Barack Obama had said he envisioned a substantial outcome on the TPP in time for his trip to Beijing, but U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman recently admitted there would be no agreement during the APEC forum.

The TPP countries have struggled to strike a deal due partly to Japan-U.S. bickering over market access for agricultural products and autos.

So, while Obama might be "determined" to complete the corporate coup by the end of the year, the rest of the world might not be quite as willing to succumb to multinational corporate greed. Or, the individual greedy interests of the potentates involved might not jibe enough "to get the job done." And if we're really lucky, the Embassy will be bugged and some enterprising Chinese Ed Snowden will leak the goods on how the ruling class plans to stick it to the little guy. 

A withering editorial published Wednesday in the Chinese Global Times should also give the president pause. Here's what passes for the welcome mat from China's official government press organ:

US public opinion has downgraded Obama. Former president George W. Bush met with criticism due to his failure in the war on terror.

Obama always utters "Yes, we can," which led to the high expectations people had for him. But he has done an insipid job, offering nearly nothing to his supporters. US society has grown tired of his banality.

Undoubtedly, Obama is one of the post-Cold War presidents who had to undergo difficult times. He has encountered the global financial crisis and the decline of US influence. He has found many thorny problems because he is the first African-American president in history. As a result, he can only get limited tolerance and acceptance.

Obama has behaved much more prudently than most of his predecessors, and has thus lacked the ability to push forward complicated issues. What's worse, Obama is in the midst of a time when partisan politics is becoming more extreme.

That party interests are placed higher than the interests of the country and its people is an inherent shortcoming of Western political systems. The problem is particularly acute when the US undergoes difficulties. Cohesion in American society is diminishing.

Obama's best performance is empty rhetoric, while he achieved nothing on issues such as lowering the income gap. The American people have not benefited from the economic recovery.

Ouch. Of course, the Chinese people working in the Wal-mart and Foxconn factories for pennies an hour haven't exactly benefited from the Chinese economy either. So this editorial is likely, at least in part, some empty rhetorical payback on the international playground of oligarchic bullies. But still.

All the salesmanship posturing by Obama might be moot anyway, since there's also a ray of bright domestic sunshine to augment the international silver lining. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen writes that Tuesday's Republican "rout" will further reduce Obama's chances of gaining so-called Congressional "fast track authority" to take care of his Big Business clientele:

The issue is not who is Senate Majority leader. The fight over trade authority is always won or lost in the U.S. House of Representatives. Recall that second-term Democratic President Bill Clinton lost a bid for Fast Track in 1998 in the GOP-controlled House with 171 Democrats and 71 GOP members voting “no.” (Clinton had Fast Track for only two of his eight years. Indeed, in the past two decades, the only president to obtain Fast Track was President George W. Bush, and winning that five-year grant required a two-year effort at the start of Bush’s first term and a lot of political capital, after which Fast Track passed by one vote in a GOP-controlled House in 2002.)

The reason that the GOP controlling the Senate could make Fast Track’s passage less likely is related to who will now be writing a trade authority bill. The old Fast Track trade authority mechanism faces a significant bloc of GOP House opposition and virtually no House Democratic support. Outgoing Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) had undertaken an inclusive process to get input to write his own version of trade authority, which he dubbed Smart Track. That process and its outcome could have broken the bipartisan House opposition to the old Fast Track system.

(snip)

A significant bloc of House GOP does not want to delegate more power to Obama, especially as the GOP has been attacking him as the “imperial president” who grabs legislative authority for his own. Tea party activists oppose Fast Track per se and anything that empowers Obama, which leaves GOP lawmakers who support Fast Track exposed to the dreaded tea party primary threat. To make political matter worse, House GOP lawmakers know that even if the GOP votes were available to pass Fast Track on a party line vote, almost no Democrats will vote to give their own president such authority, so any fallout from future trade pacts would be owned solely by the GOP.

Gridlock does occasionally have its unintended benefits for regular people. Remember, it was only because of Tea Party intransigence that Obama was unable to ram through his cuts to Social Security and Medicare in 2011, after his last "shellacking."

But wait. With the very crafty and sly Mitch McConnell in power, beware of a reprise of the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich partnership from hell that saw, among other atrocities, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the end of direct cash aid to poor people. Obama and McConnell are already plotting a way to "repatriate" offshore wealth stashes at little to no cost to the greedy hoarders. They could also very well sidestep the "fast/smart track authority" stumbling block altogether, and get some kind of a deal passed in full public view, with the full advice and consent of Congress. In oligarchic paradise, anything is possible. Since the whole purpose of capitalism is continued growth, if they have to relinquish their secrecy, so be it. Public opinion be damned.

The majority of Americans declare themselves disgusted with politicians. But far from being chastened, Obama and McConnell appear on the world stage in full triumphalist mode. "I'm optimistic about our future," crowed the president in the wake of his pseudo-whomping. "I have good reason to be."

So we can't let our guard down. Especially in states where they're celebrating pot legalization. The powers that be would love for you to be permanently mellowed out as they get on with their bipartisan creative destruction.

**Potus: Beltway insider-speak for President of the United States.